


Episode 1: England, California

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Series: The Canyon's Arms Are All We Know [1]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 10:28:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18547945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: This is the extended version of the "Route 70, Outside Roswell" fic that I promised would happen at some point.  A "middle of nowhere" AU in which is everyone is a little bit more broken, and everyone has to work a little bit harder to heal.Kara's trip through the Phantom Zone was difficult and left her struggling with social skills and management of her emotions and senses.Alex's work for the DEO is less black-ops and more equal parts therapist, doctor, social worker and cop. She drinks a little too much in order to deal with the pressure.Fort Rozz never crashed on earth, but Astra did.Enjoy my atmospheric playlist here:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSzT1iLO1-_WyN9MBHANT87rOuOJDiumS





	Episode 1: England, California

Alex put her hand on Vartaq’s forehead. He was sweating profusely. She reached into her bag, and pulled out a syringe.

He shook his head. He blinked, and then a second set of eyelids beneath the outer ones blinked vertically. “I don’t like needles.”

She patted his muscular shoulder sympathetically.“Vartaq, I know you don’t like needles, but we need to get this shot into you. This climate’s not agreeing with you. You know it’s going to take me time to get through the necessary paperwork to have you moved up north.”

He began shaking, and both sets of eyelids blinked more rapidly. “Agent Danvers, I’m sorry, I just can’t…”

She put the syringe down. Cadmus had gotten to him before the DEO had, and while the DEO had managed a successful extraction, he’d been experimented on for several days first. Hence, the dislike for needles.

“Listen, if we can’t get this into you, you’re not gonna last till we can move you.”

Vartaq put his big, meaty hands over his face. “No needles!” he wailed, suddenly sounding like a child despite the fact that hehad the booming voice of a particularly large man. “NO!NO NEEDLES!”

Alex sighed and ran her hands over her eyes a couple of times. “Okay, buddy, okay. We’re going to do this like before, okay?”She patted the backs of his hands. “Paws off your face, please.”

He peeked out from behind his thick fingers for a moment. She held up both hands.

“See? Empty.”

He slowly lowered his hands back into his lap. Alex took him by the elbow and led him to the window of the crooked shack on the soybean farm where he lived and worked. She pointed out the window and they spent a few moments standing there, side by side, looking at the waves of nodding, leafy plants, listening to the breezes leak in, whistling through a gap in the window frame.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said quietly. “I don’t miss the wars on Ki’narr at all.”

She nodded sympathetically. “I bet you don’t.” She patted his broad back. “But I think we can locate you somewhere just as nice, and it might be a little more like home for you.”

She took out her phone and pulled up pictures of Denali National Park and Mount McKinley, its peaks covered in snow. She showed him a large lake covered in ice, ringed with frost-peppered evergreens. “This place is called Alaska. It’s very cold there.”

He stared quietly for a moment. “It’s magnificent.”

She nodded. “It’ll be a whole lot better for you than here. But we’ve got to keep you alive till we can move you. And that means, I’ve gotta get you this shot.”

He frowned, but didn’t fidget. “Can I keep looking at Alaska while you do it?”

“Yeah.”

She knew where the thickest skin was on his shoulder. She jammed the needle through where it looked and felt like elephant hide, and into the vein underneath. He barely felt it. As usual, just getting him to relax was the trick. The fear of the needle was far worse than its actual sting. When she was done, she reached into her bag and took out a cellophane-wrapped lollipop. “I’ve got something for you for being such a champ.”

“Is it cherry?” Vartaq asked hopefully.

“Of course.”

 

 

******

 

 

Vartaq was wrong. It wasn’t particularly beautiful here.She lived and worked in what most people thought of as the forgotten California, when they thought of it at all; long stretches of nothing except tawny grass and scrub brush, and then farms, and then more nothing. A good two and a half to three hours from anything like a beach or a palm tree. She could buzz along at seventy five miles an hour and not run into another soul for for thirty minutes, if her timing was right.

The Danvers family had lived right smack in the middle of Bakersfield when she was a kid. But when Kara had come to live with them, it became clear immediately that they needed something a little more… remote.

She sent a text to her boss:

_He’s treated for now but we need to step up his paperwork if possible. He’s not handling the climate well._

 

The reply came back:

_You know Central Office doesn’t like to do relocates._

 

She sighed with disgust.

_J’onn, he’s going to DIE. These shots were only ever meant to be a short term solution. He’s driving around on a doughnut._

 

A good ten minutes elapsed in which the highway lines slipped by beneath the wheels of her beat-up Subaru Forrester.

_I know, Alex. I’m trying. Just do your best._

 

****

 

She stopped in at Noonan’s on the way home. She knew she probably shouldn’t, because her mother had been alone with Kara all day and probably needed a break, but she just needed a breather before she walked back into the house.

Alex didn’t mind her job. She had a natural instinct for caregiving, or at least had learned its habits and rhythms well enough that it was the same thing. It was an opportunity to make use of her PhD in exobiology. And the nominal combat training and license to pack heat weren’t bad either. But it could grind on a person sometimes. If you were an extraterrestrial on earth who needed the kind of help Alex Danvers could render, you were often in pretty bad shape. Sometimes Alex felt like she could only shoulder so much heartbreak in a day.

That was why she needed to stop at Noonan’s before going home and doing more of the same.

She loved Kara. Her adopted sister was amazing in a million different ways. But the unpredictability could be exhausting sometimes. And Alex wasn’t sure why, but she was feeling a little worn thin lately.

The barroom door groaned open, and she dragged herself across the linoleum to the jukebox, which was playing something by the Counting Crows, and put a few quarters in. She punched up some country music, took a seat at the bar, and after a moment of staring blankly up at the various neon signs above it, ordered a few shots of Jaeger and a beer chaser.

“Rough day?” the bartender, who was also the proprietress, wondered aloud. She was a tiny blonde who ran this place like she was the Queen of England, California.

“Nah, just the usual,” Alex answered. She crushed some peanuts between her fingers, dropped the shells in a bowl, and popped them in her mouth.

The bartender placed the two shots and the beer in front of her.

“Thanks, Cat.”

Cat winked at her and went to answer the the old rotary phone that hung on the wall over the register. Alex was happy enough to get lost in her cups for a few minutes.

Two shots gone, well into a beer, and halfway through the second chorus of “Jolene”, the door opened and an unwelcome sight walked in. “Miss Danvers.”

“I’m ignoring you, Max.”

Max owned one of the big factory farms out this way and he had a way of getting on every last nerve she had.

“How’s your sister?”He grinned at her.

She felt her fist balling up. “Was I speaking Chinese? I said I’m ignoring you.”

“ _Rúguǒ nǐ shuō zhōngwén, wǒ jiù míngbáile,_ ” he answered cheerfully. _If you were speaking Chinese, I’d have understood._

 _“Zài nà zhǒng qíngkuàng xià, guānbì tā mā de,_ ” she shot back. _In that case, shut the fuck up._ She’d taken a couple of years of it in college and found she’d had an ear for it. The grammar wasn’t that different from Kryptonese, actually, which she’d learned a little of when she was first trying to help Kara get settled in.

Cat looked at Max and smiled a smile that stopped well short of her eyes. “Max, you know what? I’m closed.”

He stopped short, but kept grinning. He looked around at the three other truckers nursing beers with the brims of their hats pulled low, and then back at Alex. “You sure? You don’t look closed.”

She continued smiling. “You’re about this close to Miss Danvers leaving an imprint of your face on the surface of my brand new stainless steel bar top. So, I am doing you a favor, Max, and yes. I. Am. Closed.”

“I’d just love to know what’s in that head of hers,” he pushed, continuing to needle at Alex.

“You know, Max, I could have Jimmy back there show you out if I’m not expressing myself plainly enough.” Cat, despite still smiling, looked ready to break a pitcher in his face herself.

He stopped. Jimmy, the fry cook, was a large brick wall of a guy, worked in back. He was a gentle enough soul, but you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of his right hook.

Alex stood up. “You don’t need to bother Jimmy.” She stepped close to Max and growled at him. “My sister is not a trained monkey, and she’s not coming to play with your toys.”

Still wearing his shit-eating grin, he whispered, “I bet I could change her mind…”

Before he’d even finished his sentence, Alex had him by the collar and was smacking his head against the bar top. Getting angry felt good. She was satisfied with the thud his forehead made against the stainless steel bar.

Cat scoffed. “I told you, Max.”

She was about to repeat the action, but two strong arms grabbed her shoulders from behind. “Easy there, killer. Don’t want to have to call the cops, right?”

“Goddammit, Jimmy.” But Alex huffed, and allowed him to pull her away from Max.

He patted her on the back. “Alright, good job.” She felt him, still gripping her shoulders, turn to Cat. “Hey, Cat, you mind if I knock off a little early? I think I ought to help her get home.”

“I’m fine,” Alex began to protest.

“Darling, you pounded three shots of Jaeger and most of a pint of Tecate in about 20 minutes,” Cat interrupted.“You are not fine. You go ahead, Jimmy, get her home.”

Max was still leaning against the bar, halfway to upright, groaning a little. “Always a pleasure, Miss Danvers!” he called after as she left.

“Fuck off, Max.”

 

 

********

 

 

“Jimmy, you don’t have to drive me,” she was still objecting as his pickup truck was rolling down Route 31. She was feeling a little motion sick.

“Yeah, I kind of do.”

She frowned. “You know, you don’t have any obligation to me. I mean, just because we both…” She trailed off awkwardly. “…you know.”

He smiled. “You still love her?”

Alex fiddled with the radio, refusing to settle on anything. “Lucy? Yeah of course. I mean, you know. Kinda. But… I knew I had to get out of your way. I mean, with the kid and all…”

He chuckled. “Look, there’s reasons Lucy and me aren’t together, that have nothing to do with you. And yeah, we have a kid together, but that’s not a good reason to be a couple.”

Alex surrendered and turned off the radio.The truck engine rumbled. Alex could feel it vibrate under the backs of her legs. “I guess.”

They rode together in a silence that was not as awkward as it could have, or even should have been.Jimmy Olson was a stand-up guy, and one of these days, Alex knew he and Lucy were going to get married. It felt inevitable. _What did a closet case like me have to offer a girl like Lucy, anyway?_

As if reading her mind, Jimmy said, “You’ve got a lot to give, Alex, you just haven’t found the right person. You’ll know who that person is when you find them.  For all you know, the right person could just fall out of the sky.”

She didn’t believe him, but it sure sounded good.

They pulled up the long driveway to the house. Eliza was sitting on the porch with a thin sweater wrapped around her shoulders. She squinted at the truck coming up the path, the corners of her mouth drawn down a little and nose wrinkled like she smelled something funny. Alex knew that look of disapproval.

When she opened the door, her mother came down the creaky wooden steps. She smiled and waved to Jimmy as he turned around to head back the way he came, and then put her hands on her hips and looked at Alex. “You went to Noonan’s?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I had a couple of hard ones this afternoon.”

“And I see you had a couple of hard ones this evening too. Are you that bad off that Jimmy had to drive you home?” She was scolding, but also a little frayed around the edges. Worried. Exhausted. Alex perceived that all in the quiver in her mother’s voice when she asked that question.

She put a hand up. “No, I figured I’d just wait it out to be safe, but Max Lord showed up and started in on me about Kara again, and–”

“Oh, don’t tell me you put a hand on him.”

“I put two, actually.”

Eliza shook her head.

“It’s fine. Just, Jimmy figured he was getting off right then anyway, so he’d just give me a ride, to be safe.” It was a small lie.

Eliza looked like she didn’t particularly buy it but wasn’t interested in drilling down. “Well, good. You’re home. See if you can coax Kara out of the attic. She blew a hole in the roof earlier when she had a meltdown and–”

“Another hole?Why didn’t you text me?”

Eliza waved a hand and started trudging back up the steps. “I can’t even get up there to see how big it is. It might not be that bad.”

Alex sighed. Somehow, one way or another, it usually was “that bad.”

 

 

*****

 

 

She clomped up the stairs to the second floor, Eliza trailing behind her.

“So, what precipitated the meltdown?”

Eliza sighed. “I… well, just look.”

Alex noticed a lot of Kara’s drawings lining the stairs on the way up: one of her cousin Clark, and then one of him as Superman, Earth’s champion, and then herself in a suit just like his. “This again? Was he on television today or something?”

Eliza nodded. “Yeah, stopped a crisis at the Hoover Dam.”

Alex nodded. Kara’s drawings were incredibly realistic, painstakingly detailed, and she produced them at speeds that were almost dizzying to watch. She picked up one of Kara, standing on top of a building, a cape swirling around her shoulders and hair blowing in the wind like a rippling flag. “How many more of these are there?”

“Oh, god,” Eliza sighed, “I don’t even know. A bunch of them. It’s really on her mind lately.”

“So what happened?” Alex stood with her arms folded, now, at the top of the stairs, underneath the door to the attic.

“Well, she showed me one of the ones of herself dressed in a … you know. A pressure suit. Like that one. With the crest like Clark’s and everything. And I said ‘maybe one day sweetie, but you’re just not ready yet.’ And that was… well, you know how it can turn into a cascade failure pretty fast.”

Alex nodded. She took a broom out of the hall closet at the top of the stairs, and knocked on the attic door a couple of times. This was unnecessary, because Kara’s hearing was superb and she already knew they were down there and had heard every word. It was just about the courtesy. “Kara? Can I come up there? Can we talk?”

A moment later, Kara’s voice came muffled through the attic door: “I prefer the apartment.”

Alex sighed. “I prefer the apartment” was Kara’s code, her way of telling them that she wanted to be an adult and make her own decisions and be in charge of her life. She wanted to live on her own. That wasn’t really possible, for a variety of reasons. Nights like these being one of them.

“Yeah,” Alex responded, “I prefer the apartment too, but sometimes we don’t get to have what we prefer. Will you let me in there so we can talk about it?”

A beat of silence went by, and then they heard Kara singing quietly. Eliza wrinkled her nose. “What is she singing?”

Alex chuckled a little. “The Stones,” she answered. She started singing along. _“You can’t always get what you want…. You can’t always get what you want … But if you try sometimes, you just might find…”_

The attic door squeaked open a little and she could see Kara’s bright eyes on the other side of it. _“You get what you nee-eeeed!”_

Alex smiled and nodded. After a second or two, the door descended a little more, and then Kara came floating down like a dandelion pod.

“I prefer the apartment,” she said again.

Alex nodded, and hugged her. “I know. Me too.” She twisted her head around to look at her mother. “Is there dinner?”

Eliza nodded. “I can throw in a couple of frozen pizzas for her.”

Alex patted Kara on the back once. “OK. Eliza’s going to make you pizza.”

“Pizza!” Kara extricated herself delicately and looked at Alex. “And then?”

Alex thought. “Hot shower?”

“Ice cream?” Kara suggested.

“Pizza. Then ice cream. Then hot shower. Then bed.”

Kara seemed satisfied with that.She came downstairs and sat at the kitchen table, drawing pizza and ice cream in the formations of mountains and rivers and trees. Alex gave her a good, hard squeeze from behind, and then straightened up and announced, “I’m going up to have a look at that roof. Where’s the ladder?”

“Now?” Eliza snorted. “It’s getting dark. Look at it in the morning.”

But Alex was dogged. “No. I’ve got a long drive tomorrow, I’m leaving before sun up. I’ll be home by three in the afternoon but I need to be out the door early.I won’t have time till then. I need to do it now.” Fact was, she felt guilty. She had gone and drank instead of coming home. She needed to clean up her mess. Wouldn’t be able to sleep till she did.

She marched out to the shed and dragged out the ladder, carried it to the side of the house, and then after a moment of indecision about which end went up, slapped it against the white shingles and gritted her teeth through the horrendous screeching it made as she extended it, and then snapped it into place.

Eliza came out and hovered behind her anxiously. “I really don’t think you should, Jimmy had to drive you home and–”

“Mom, I told you. I’m fine.”

Five minutes later, she was ass over tit in the blackberry bushes, nothing broken, but scratched up and sore in places she shouldn’t be.She was not fine.

 

 

*******

 

 

_Six months earlier, outside Roswell, New Mexico…_

 

Astra’s pod was hurtling toward the ground. Thankfully, it looked sparsely populated.She wasn’t sure if Rao could hear her prayers all the way out here, and wasn’t sure if he’d been listening before that anyway, but she prayed, and braced for impact.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> This story will be presented as installments in a series, so if you’re enjoying it, please subscribe to my profile or to the series itself. 
> 
> Thanks!


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